With

Infantjoy's With is part appendix, part follow-up to the duo's well-praised debut, Where the Night Goes, featuring several remixes of that album's tracks (variably referred to as "revisions," "reflections," and "adjustments") and several new original pieces that were apparently inspired by these reworked versions. In any case, it's a companion piece that also stands well enough on its own, a fluid whole ably inhabiting an elegant, cinematically ambient space, with only one truly jarring disruption. The new tracks are largely effective mood pieces, taking up the first album's Erik Satie fixation in their gently musing piano lines but introducing a darker undercurrent of anxiety and urgency in their rhythms and intermittent electronic bleeps. The subtle but pervasive eeriness fits into the album's vague preoccupation with ghosts and spirits, as evidenced by Paul Morley's spoken ruminations on the supernatural in "A Haunted Space" and "Absence" and the Sarah Nixey-sung cover of Japan's "Ghosts" (reprised here in a hovering, skeletal remix by Populous). While generally in keeping with the prevailing mood, the reworkings (which are interspersed throughout the running order) tend to stand somewhat more apart from the pack, both for better — isan's typically glistening take on "Composure," which they've liberally sprinkled with flittering shards of crystal, and Tunng's application of folksy pluckings and queerly muttered interjections to the closing "Arrival" — and for worse — Handshake's mix of "Someone," which sounds haunted all right, but in a violent, glitchified way (at least relative to its surroundings). It's not an unmitigated assault, but it definitely feels disconcerting and somewhat baffling in this context, and (perhaps along with the nifty but decidedly beat-driven Lodge remix "Exposure") prevents With from functioning as a fully cohesive ambient work. Program out that track and you've got a smooth, intriguing, and decidedly pleasurable journey. ~ K. Ross Hoffman, Rovi